It's been said that the circumstances surrounding one's conception determine his or her destiny. Raymond Fast was conceived on Thanksgiving Day when hormonal teens in the throes of puppy love slipped away from the lock-step trappings of traditional family gatherings and surrendered to their uncharted passion. He is an artist of quintessential eccentricity with a flair for spontaneity, adventure, and romance.

Raymond has always been a writer. Before he could manipulate a pencil, he was writing in his head. As a school child, he looked forward to assignments composing stories, poems, anything creative. Though most of his creative energy in high school was dedicated to the visual arts (he also draws and paints), Raymond found time to write for the school newspaper, and the annual school literary magazine accepted several of his submissions.

Despite his interest in writing, with virtually no instruction or mentoring, he languished in his craft until his early forties. In 2004, he joined a local writers group in Cartersville, Georgia. An attentive and committed student, he learned quickly and soon began seeing his work in print. The following year, he discovered the stage and became enamored with every aspect of putting on a show, from set construction to teching to acting. He introduced his pen to the enchantment of live theatre and has since applied himself unceasingly to writing plays.

Beside his 16 years of military service, Raymond has done everything from delivering newspapers to typesetting them, cleaning homes to building them, loading trucks to repairing them. He has traveled throughout the eastern United States and visited such foreign lands as England, Italy, Ecuador, and Louisiana. Among his many adventures, he has been homeless, lived with a genuine con artist, and experienced unexplainable phenomena while on a submarine in the Bermuda triangle on Friday the thirteenth.

Writing is his passion; theatre is his playground. Given his genetic predisposition to last well into his nineties, Raymond is probably little more than half way into the crazy, challenging, fascinating odyssey called life. Nonetheless, he has enough material to keep him busy writing for the other half. He has great expectations that his work will reach beyond what he can see and live beyond his years.